6 COMPANIES, 6 SECTORS, €3.5 MILLION INVESTMENT SOUGHT

ACE is hosting its second e-pitch where 6 selected ACE companies have the opportunity to pitch online to investors around the Europe.

Investors from across Europe are invited to take one hour on 2 April at 17:00 CET to watch pitches from six of Europe's top 100 ICT start-ups with the potential to grow globally. Participants can engage directly with the entrepreneurs via the online Q&A session immediately after each pitch.

Read about the six companies pitching on 2 April - from Belgium, Germany, Ireland and Portugal - here and register now to guarantee your place here!

The #ACESummit 2015 in partnership with the Global Entrepreneurship Congress took place in Milan on the 18th March at the MiCo - Milano Congressi. During a full day of discussions, interactions and networking, over 150 participants from 15 countries and 50 ACE selected companies met in Milan.

The event ran for a full day and included26 company pitches to investors from Business Angels Europe, Italian Angels for Growth, EBAN, Orange, iSource, RedAngels and others. A Clinic on Living Labs and how they can help your startup was chaired by ENoLL and the LILA Project, with participations from several ACE partners as experienced living lab practicioners: CUE, Technoport, iMinds and FVH.

AWatify Doutb session was also organised, featuring five of the ACE selected startups sharing their adventures in business ownership. The Summit was accompanied by an all day exhibition space featuring all the ACE partners and their supported companies, and a total of 35 pre-scheduled meetings between participants took place in the networking area.

The ACE Summit was honored with the presence of Irish Minister for Agriculture Simon Coveney who participated in a lunch with the Irish companies supported through ACE. Bobby McDonagh from the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade was also present and gave a speech on the Irish startup scene at the Summit's closing session.

On February 18th, kickstarting EBN's partnership with the leading Global Enterprise Software giant SAP, two innovative Startups from two ACE Partners participated in the high profile SAP Startup Forum Event for EMEA held in London, and attracted the attention of SAP executives.

EBN, the coordinating partner of ACE, recently started a pilot “Open Innovation" initiative with the aim to enable EU|BICs and their innovative startups to enter into novel partnerships with leading ICT and other Corporates to help accelerate Startups' business growth.

On February 18th, four innovative Startups from four EU|BICs part of the EBN Innovation Network participated in the high profile SAP Startup Forum Event for EMEA. Two of them are ACE supported companies! They are:

CleverMaps, from JIC, the South Moravian Innovation Center, the Brno EU|BIC

This London event is part of a global SAP Startup.Focus Program which helps promising startups in the Big Data, Predictive and Real-Time Analytics space to (a) build applications on the SAP HANA in-memory platform and (b) accelerate their go-to-market, by helping to sell "market-ready" solutions jointly to their customer base.

The event was hosted by Senior SAP executives and brought together 100+ Startups, along with a few enterprise customers, venture capitalists, and media/press professionals. A handful of Startups who attended the event will have the privilege to be finally selected into the Program. SAP will assist them to develop their pilot solution on SAP HANA, then supporting them to go-to-market, bringing their solutions to SAP's enterprise customers.

SAP Startup.Focus Programoffers the following benefits:

Free access to cutting edge HANA technology platform,

Free access to technical HANA experts, Tech Bootcamps,

Free access to Marketing and Sales enablement and support,

Access to Account Executives and Customers in the relevant industry/solution domain.

More information about EBN's Open Innovation initiative and its collaboration with SAP available here.